The fictional concerns of Paul Auster veer between the urgently external – Leviathan features terrorism, Man in the Dark predicts severe civil unrest in America – and the narrowly internal: The Book of Illusions and Travels in the Scriptorium are among his many works that feature books within books or in which a character turns out to have been writing the story we thought Auster was telling.

Sometimes these elements of the wider world and the literary world overlap – a terrorist or a freedom fighter in these books is likely to be a keen reader or writer – and Sunset Park, Auster's 16th novel, again combines his outward-facing and inward-contemplating tendencies.

Set largely in the fall of 2008, against the background of the rescue package for the American banks and the election of President Obama, this is consciously a credit crunch fiction. The narrative is divided between a number of characters whose names head their sections like name-badges at a corporate conference – Miles Heller, Bing Nathan, Alice Bergstrom, Morris Heller – and who are linked by an illegal squat in a house in a rough district of Brooklyn which gives the novel its title and lends a useful metaphor of decline and fall to the story.

In a pivotal passage, Miles reflects on why, though a child of the wealthy middle-class, he has ended up on occupied premises, fearing the knock of the authorities at the door: "The only problem is cash, the same problem all the others are facing. He no longer has a job and the three thousand dollars he brought with him amount to little more than pennies. Like it or not, he is stuck." Miles is a double economic symbol: the last job he had involved photographing the possessions left behind in houses abandoned in Florida by residents no longer able to afford their mortgages.

But the fact that this character's involvement in America's fiscal disintegration should be artistic is typical of the way in which, even when an Auster novel marches into the town square with a placard held high, it tends to keep at least one foot in the study. In the cross-section of recession America represented by Sunset Park, almost everyone is, or wants to be, a novelist, artist or performer. Typically, Miles's estranged parents are a famous actor, rehearsing for her Broadway return, and a celebrated literary publisher.

Indeed, the book's only specific evidence of what the crash means for the US comes from a literary perspective. Morris Heller, the publisher, laments to his friend Renzo, a great Roth-like Jewish-American author, that "last year, they published forty-seven books, this year thirty eight . . . [and] . . . it's a rough time for first novels, very rough." Subsequently, the reader learns that Heller Snr has been optimistically exaggerating the position and Renzo's latest novella may not be enough to reverse the downturn.

Another of the squatters, Alice Bergstrom, who has a loose sexual arrangement with an aspiring novelist called Jake Baum, is writing a thesis on William Wyler's 1947 movie The Best Years of Our Lives, an upbeat presentation of wounded servicemen returning home after the second world war. The movie is one of two works with superficially optimistic titles that underpin the story, the other being Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, in which Miles's mum is about to play a woman buried up to her neck.

Appearing in a novel by Paul Auster that itself happens to have an ambiguously gentle title, these literary references create a frisson for the reader and establish a pleasant uncertainty as to whether the novelist's take on the US economy will finally be Wyleresque or Beckettian.

The Best Years of Our Lives is also used as one of the links between the initially distinct sections: while Alice, in her stolen room, is analysing the film's depiction of father-son relationships, Miles's dad happens to choose the movie from a list of cinematic classics on his in-flight entertainment menu.

Such chimes and doublings between unattached chapters are one of the pleasures – or, to his detractors, pains – of Auster's strenuously playful fiction. In Sunset Park, two characters are involved in relationships with inappropriately younger sexual partners, two have suffered the death of a child, and so on. Reading an Auster story is often like watching a throng of grey-suited commuters on a station concourse, a pair of whom are suddenly seen to be wearing identical yellow-and-purple-striped shirts.

Auster is a brilliant literary technician, always scrupulously in control of structure, tone and point of view. Any of his novels could be used to instruct a class of apprentice authors in the mechanics of fiction, although whether they should be used as a template is more in doubt. The books often feel – and Sunset Park strikingly so – cold and distanced, almost as if they were a demonstrative exercise for a set of creative writing majors.

Although the vocabulary and inner lives of the various characters are differentiated, every section employs the same rhythmic, polished, third-person, past-tense narration – all told, not shown, with minimal dialogue. You feel that, even this late in his career, Auster might himself benefit from a creative writing teacher urging him to vary his effects.

Readers seeking impeccably conceived and composed fiction are, with Auster, in safe, if rather tightly constricting, hands. But you suspect that, if Upton Sinclair or John Steinbeck had written a novel about the present economic crisis, it would not have left the impression that the real disaster is the cutbacks in publishers' fiction lists.